“The only way to fix a spirit is with lots of love and kindness.
And with long walks outside, in the fresh air. That’s the way to
heal a lot of broken parts.”
This makes good sense to him. The evening routine hops back
onto its tracks; the storybook is chosen. I tell him not to wipe snot
on his shirt. Or the wall. He laughs, then, and pretends
to wipe it on my shirt instead. I begin to read. Soon, he
is asleep, his spirit safe in his small animal body.
BUT THE ADULT TRUTH IS more complex. After all
the appetite, after countries, languages, lovers, music,
after the long, rich, wasteful search for wisdom, at times
so pointed and fierce, at times meandering, undisciplined, and
always just like anyone else’s, perhaps the only question I have
ever sought to answer is the one my son asked that night. What
grief it has brought me, that the only broken spirit I could learn
to fix was my own. It has never seemed like enough.
Recently, I sat down one afternoon to meditate upon my
brother. Or just to meditate, and allow the thought of him in, at
last. He had not been in contact for over four months. No one
knew where he was. He is usually good at keeping in touch, even
when he has fallen off the wagon and started using again. He was
supposed to get out of jail in July, but it was October and there
was only silence.
I had begun to consider the possibility that he was dead. I
had to begin preparing. He had been suicidal before going into
prison—a state of despair that he had never experienced before,
at least not to my knowledge. He had phoned me, sobbing, dis-
traught about his latest descent, which had been a long, hurtful
one. I talked to him. He was going to check himself into the hos-
pital, but we both knew that they would release him the next day,
as soon as he was sober and coherent. I was over two thousand
miles away, but even if I could have gone to him, I knew that I
wouldn’t be able to help. Within a few days he had put a band-
aid on the problem by getting into enough trouble to be sent to
jail. It was the first time in more than a decade that he had been
incarcerated. I had hoped—and he had believed—that that part
of his life was over. For him, returning to prison meant utter
failure as a man.
I thought that maybe something bad—something worse—
had happened in prison, and that he might have been released
and taken himself off, figured out a way to disappear. It was
not his style to do something like that, but when a person sinks
down deep into the shame and muck of self-loathing, he is
no longer himself. Sometimes he cannot pull himself out of
that viscous, poisonous substance. It had already happened to
another sibling of mine, an older sister, decades ago. Suicide can
infect families like a virus, even generations apart. I decided it
was time to stop running away from the thought and, therefore,
was feeling silently, secretly frantic. It was a subject that I dis-
cussed with no one.
Well, not exactly. Just when I was beginning to use the word,
in my own mind, in regard to my brother’s fate, one night my son
when I thought that I knew my brother as well as I know my
child, and I was wrong.
It happens that the question my son asks me this evening is
one of the large ones. It is, perhaps, at the core of all religious and
philosophical inquiry. Psychologists and psychiatrists would be
happy to weigh in on this subject, but, alas, the only expert this
five-year-old has tonight is his mother, exhausted after a busy
day and anxious to usher him into sleep. But first I must respond
to the query, “Do I have a spirit?”
“Yes, my love, you have a spirit. All people and animals have
spirits.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in your body. And your mind. And your heart.”
“It’s in all of me?” He puts his hands on his chest. Then on his
bare heels.
“Every part of you.” Already I have given up rushing him. Here
is a window into the boy’s private mind. I lean in, gingerly, and
look around.
“Right now? Can I feel my spirit right now?”
“Can you? Take a deep breath, then let your breath out slowly.”
He inhales, exhales noisily. Sticks a finger up his nose, digs.
“There. Did you feel your spirit?”
His face articulates a peculiar, small smile. Secretive but joyful.
Almost an adult expression. “I feel it! My spirit!”
“That’s great. I’m glad.”
“But we can’t see it, the spirit?”
“Well, you can see your body, and your spirit gives your body
life. So, in a way, you can see it.”
“But if it’s also in your mind, it’s invisible.”
In a past existence, did he go to school among rigorous Jesuits,
I wonder? “That’s true. You’re right. So we can say that the spirit
is also invisible. An invisible energy.”
The pause spans three or four colossal seconds. Invisible
energy whirs inside him like a dynamo, but his voice comes out
surprisingly quiet. “Can a spirit get broken?”
I look into the small, finely sculpted face. Only one scar on
his entire body, and it’s on that beautiful face. His right cheek;
he fell. It’s already faded, though, hard to see unless you know
it’s there. “Sometimes a spirit gets broken when frightening or
painful things happen to a person. And if that person is alone,
without anyone to help them at the right moment.”
The theoretical disappears like smoke. Tears stand in my eyes
as he gazes into them, but he doesn’t notice because he is busy
following his line of inquiry. “Do you know how to fix a spirit?”
he asks, meaning, If my spirit got broken, would you be able to
repair me?
“Do you know how to fix a spirit?” Timo asks,
meaning, If my spirit got broken, would you
be able to repair me?
SHAMBHALA SUN MARCH 2013 75